Skiers hitting slopes this season in record numbers

The Spring Festival of 2021, with Lunar New Year's Day falling on Feb 12, is relatively late compared with previous years. Thus, it has provided a longer sales cycle for ice and snow tours, and the number of people who take trips this year is expected to significantly surpass that of last winter, said Trip.com.

Sales of ice and snow tours during the winter of late 2018 and early 2019 reached 386 billion yuan in China. This year, revenue is expected to hit a new high, said the China Tourism Academy.

In the run-up to the 2022 Winter Olympics, which will be held in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, Hebei province, the two cities are continuing to attract more skiing enthusiasts.

High-speed trains now connect Beijing and Zhangjiakou, with the latter located about 200 kilometers northwest of the capital, and with travel time being cut from four hours to about one hour.

Jiang Tian, a skiing enthusiast in Beijing, went to a resort in Chongli district, Zhangjiakou, on a weekend last month. He said it was the largest number of skiers at the venue he's seen in quite a while.

Fridays and Saturdays have become the most popular days for skiing-related hotel bookings, and hotels adjacent to slopes are the most popular. Travelers also pay attention to parking conditions and catering options within hotels, Trip.com said.

The online travel agency also launched a skiing channel on its home page. It introduced more in-depth travel products online, including various transportation options from cities like Beijing to nearby ski resorts, as well as lift ticket packages and skiing lessons.

During this year's Nov 11 Singles Day online shopping spree, the booking volumes of admission tickets to ski resorts and related excursions nationwide soared 860 percent year-on-year, according to Trip.com.

On Fliggy, as of late November, about 200,000 people reserved hotels near ski resorts in Northeast China this season. About 70 percent of total expected travelers chose to go skiing during the year-end holiday season, and most travelers who would like to go skiing in Northeast China come from Shanghai, Beijing, Zhejiang province's Hangzhou and cities in South China, it found.

This year, more than 10 domestic carriers have launched various products offering nearly unlimited flight passes for a set price to encourage passengers to take more flights. Passengers with these passes can usually take flights to a Chinese mainland city with certain restrictions or blackout dates, and they are typically only valid on weekends.

In recent weeks, popular skiing destinations such as Jilin and Heilongjiang topped the list of places that people choose to fly to with their special flight passes, according to Fliggy.

In addition, a growing number of destinations with warmer temperatures and little snowfall have built indoor ski slopes using artificial snow-making methods.

Ski resorts in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Sichuan province's Chengdu, Jiangsu province's Wuxi and Guangdong province's Guangzhou have been quite popular for locals not willing to travel long distances. In the past few weeks, they have seen bookings surge more than 110 percent year-on-year, Fliggy found.